All Things Sunset Limited (West)

Wiki on Phoenix Union Station: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Sta ... t_services

Current services

No regular passenger trains call at Union Station. However, as recently as 2010, there were efforts to bring back passenger rail service to Phoenix.[4] The facility was used until 2020 for a data center for Sprint, which was a Southern Pacific subsidiary.[5] The building was sold in 2020 and the new owners propose it to be a food hall or other event space, as a centerpiece of a larger project.[6]

Amtrak operates the Sunset Limited three times a week from the town of Maricopa, which is in Pinal County thirty miles (48 km) south of downtown Phoenix. A private company, White's Taxi Shuttle, operates a taxi service to the Phoenix metro area; as of April 2017 there is Amtrak Thruway Motorcoach service to and from Maricopa with stops in Tempe and Phoenix (including Sky Harbor airport).[7] The Sunset Limited also directly serves Tucson, and many Phoenix passengers travel to Tucson as an alternative to boarding the train in Maricopa (Greyhound operates frequent daily motorcoach service between Phoenix and Tucson; the Tucson Greyhound depot is about one-half mile (0.8 km) east of the Tucson Amtrak station).[citation needed]

Amtrak's Southwest Chief train route operates through Flagstaff daily, and Amtrak provides guaranteed through-ticketed Thruway Motorcoach connecting shuttle service via Airport Shuttle of Phoenix or Arizona Shuttle from Metrocenter Mall (in north central Phoenix) and the town of Camp Verde (in Yavapai County) to and from the trains at Flagstaff.

The nearest Valley Metro Rail station, City Hall ("Washington Street and Central Avenue and Jefferson Street and 1st Avenue"), is half a mile away.[8]

New passenger rail service connecting Phoenix and Tucson to Los Angeles is heavily supported as of 2021 by the American Jobs Plan. By 2035, Amtrak has proposed to have rail service connecting 16 stations in Arizona.[9]

In June 2023, Amtrak submitted a grant application requesting $716 million for various long distance proposals. Among them is to bring Sunset Limited service back to Phoenix. [10]

https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/lo ... 300137007/

...
Part of this initiative would include bringing back to Phoenix a stop for the Sunset Limited, a train that runs from New Orleans to Los Angeles. The Sunset Limited stopped Phoenix service in 1996 because of the cost of upgrading the train tracks between Buckeye and Wellton, east of Yuma. The train instead was redirected to Maricopa, about 35 miles away from Phoenix.
...

So, according to Wiki, the station has new owners and a repurposing is being pondered. It's also not close to the Valley Metro. If it's a food hall, it's use as a station may become possible once again.

Seems to me it would be cheaper just to extend Valley Metro down to Maricopa and make it a two seat ride for anyone that really wants it.

Maricopa just rebuilt their station within the last 5 years, and arguably service to Maricopa and Casa Grande is more in line with what Amtrak is supposed to be doing in terms of underserved communities.

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Rebuilding the Phoenix - Yuma route to serve the Sunset Limited would reduce the costs involved in later creating a more frequent Phoenix - LA service. Phoenix is in a poor situation right now--its growing, but its transportation options are shrinking as Sky Harbor is experiencing summer heat such that aircraft can't operate at full capacity to successfully take off, which does suggest that Phoenix's survival depends on better local and intercity public transit

RandallW wrote: ↑Sun Jun 11, 2023 11:53 am Rebuilding the Phoenix - Yuma route to serve the Sunset Limited would reduce the costs involved in later creating a more frequent Phoenix - LA service. Phoenix is in a poor situation right now--its growing, but its transportation options are shrinking as Sky Harbor is experiencing summer heat such that aircraft can't operate at full capacity to successfully take off, which does suggest that Phoenix's survival depends on better local and intercity public transit

Very true. Phoenix has the room, just needs some fresh track and work on the existing stuff. Plus you can do LA-Phoenix-Tulsa fairly easily once everything is done.

Phoenix - Tucson Corridor ID'd: KOLD.com

Federal funding moves forward for direct train service from Tucson to Phoenix
...
After years of conversations, the Arizona Department of Transportation will receive $500,000 in federal funding to re-establish Amtrak service from the Old Pueblo to the Valley.

Currently, the closest Amtrak station to Phoenix is in Maricopa in Pinal County, more than 35 miles from downtown Phoenix.

Without an established direct route of public transportation to Phoenix, many Tucsonans told 13 News it can be quite the hassle heading north.
...

Amtrak filing to STB claiming UP is destroying needed dispatch decision data.

The filing says that UP destroys its dispatch playbacks — videos providing information about dispatching decisions — after 99 hours, and that UP claims it is under no obligation to preserve those playbacks. Amtrak says this does not comply with the terms set by the board when it set the terms for its investigation last July [see “STB announces investigation …,” News Wire, July 11, 2023]. As quoted by Amtrak, the board’s order called for the preservation of all documents or data related to the subject “regardless of any parties’ ongoing document retention policy or other data destruction practices … even if they claim those documents or data are protected from discovery by privilege or otherwise.”

Sounds to me like Amtrak can't sufficiently argue their case with the documentation already provided.

That's not reason to demand a private company violate its record retention policy, especially if the outcomes and data points are available in the documentation provided in discovery.

At my company, we record calls in/out of certain facilities "for quality and training purposes" --- there's also a very strict policy on retention because of the overall cost of storage as well as labor agreements on how recordings can be used. We don't retain meeting transcripts over 14 days, and recordings are limited to I believe 7 days.

If there were an event that required preservation beyond the cutoff, 99 hours should be more than enough time to request a hold on a case by case basis.

Jeff Smith wrote: ↑Thu Dec 07, 2023 10:37 am Phoenix - Tucson Corridor ID'd: KOLD.com

Federal funding moves forward for direct train service from Tucson to Phoenix
...
After years of conversations, the Arizona Department of Transportation will receive $500,000 in federal funding to re-establish Amtrak service from the Old Pueblo to the Valley.

Currently, the closest Amtrak station to Phoenix is in Maricopa in Pinal County, more than 35 miles from downtown Phoenix.

Without an established direct route of public transportation to Phoenix, many Tucsonans told 13 News it can be quite the hassle heading north.
...

This would be brilliant with Brightline and a downtown Phoenix station. With just Maricopa or Amtrak as an operator, it's a much lesser endeavor.

eolesen wrote: ↑Fri Apr 12, 2024 12:08 am Sounds to me like Amtrak can't sufficiently argue their case with the documentation already provided.

That's not reason to demand a private company violate its record retention policy, especially if the outcomes and data points are available in the documentation provided in discovery.

At my company, we record calls in/out of certain facilities "for quality and training purposes" --- there's also a very strict policy on retention because of the overall cost of storage as well as labor agreements on how recordings can be used. We don't retain meeting transcripts over 14 days, and recordings are limited to I believe 7 days.

If there were an event that required preservation beyond the cutoff, 99 hours should be more than enough time to request a hold on a case by case basis.

Well, it's not reasonable if it wasn't ordered to do so in the first place. STB has one in place for all relevant info, and isn't dispatch decisions part of that?

99 hours... that's 4 days, plenty of time to burn the video to a data DVD or archive it on a USB drive. Cost? UP can't spare $200 for a 2TB drive and USB adapter to offload it? Storage is CHEAP and a NAS server is minimal. Cloud storage is also relatively cheap.

I don't find UP's response persuasive.

USB drives? DVDs? Most Fortune 100 companies today won't allow storage of any type to be attached to a USB port on a company issued laptop, much less a server environment.

Data on physical medium is a huge liability in any situation, but now you're talking about real-time decision making and eventing. The STB order says to provide relevant documentation. They didn't define relevant as meaning every document. If the documents preserved show the relevant details, the intent of the order was followed. UP will likely be able to argue that every relevant decision making aspect that would be captured in a video replay is also captured in the logging they preserved and provided.

There are really good reasons why discovery processes suck, mainly because lawyers are involved.... if you don't want to read that, skip below the rabbit hole warning...

Rabbit Hole Starts

If you preserve every shred of real-time data, odds are someone will find another string to pull on that's completely unrelated to the investigation.

Perhaps you're going to find where an employee is captured misgendering somebody or making a comment that somebody reinterprets as inherently racist, and they'll be fired or disciplined for that offense because it's now preserved and handed over to third parties.

By the way, that's not hyperbole. That's how NFL coach Jon Gruden was fired two years ago... years earlier he worked for ESPN, and made rude comments about the NFL commissioner and others in an email. Nobody was hurt, but he got fired (the team settled with him, he has a lawsuit pending which is currently being appealed at the Nevada Supreme Court by the NFL... they've already lost in the lower courts).

The amount of time and effort spent on that sideshow is well into the millions of dollars, and all because company documents weren't disposed of by a sound retention policy.

This is why event and data recorders on locomotives overwrite data, and why unions were opposed to cameras in the cabs. It's why corporations no longer allow email to be archived beyond a stated retention time frame, and why tools such as Microsoft Teams don't allow chat to be saved at all.

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Let's get back to the actual subject, though....

We aren't talking about lives being lost or injured here. We're also not talking about millions in economic losses.

If there's no statutory need to preserve a record, a board composed of political appointees shouldn't have the authority to impose the added burden.

The goal of the inquiry is supposed to be looking for systemic issues which cause Amtrak's trains to be delayed in favor of other trains. If that's the case, it's going to be apparent in the data, and you don't need to have real-time play-by-play of every dispatching decision made to come to that conclusion.

Goes back to the days of yellow pads and wooden pencils: destroy your working papers when their work is done.

There are really good reasons why discovery processes suck, mainly because lawyers are involved.... if you don't want to read that, skip below the rabbit hole warning...

IN a nutshell, this. UP doesn't want you to have that info and if it disappears, it can't hurt them. Everybody does this including Amtrak.

Yep, the question is whether or not STB has standing or grounds to demand "working product" be preserved -if- the results are already preserved in another form.

Courts also don't take kindly to "preserve all documents and records" without some degree of specificity. Playing semantics, UP may have complied with the letter of the order if they don't consider the replay recordings a document or record, especially since they intentionally expire in a matter of hours, where documents/records typically have a retention of months -> decades.